Was just thinking today about games which moved the industry forward. I am talking games which set a new standard for their genre, possibly not even beaten to this day. Some of my votes are: DOOM, Deus EX, Diablo 2, GTA 3 and Age of Empires 2. What are some of you thoughts? (who is going to be first to suggest half-life?)
Half Life This game showed that a game could actually represent a 'real' environment and also took the step of not making the player some soldier to begin with. Just...everything about this game was ground breaking. Homeworld The first game to actually have a good control system for space RTS. Although everything about it was brilliant, the sheer ease of controlling ships was what I remember. Homeword Cataclysm and Homeworld 2 improved on it further. GTA III This was a game that rocked the gaming world when released on the trusty PS2. IMHO the first seriously good sandbox game. C&C Red Alert Just a seriously cool game. Corny cut scenes, a dark humour in the way things happened. Just brilliant. Plus Mammoth tanks. Crysis A technological masterpiece that was launched ahead of its time and still looks fantastic today. Can still make technology struggle 9 years after its release date (yes, it really is THAT old). Deus Ex Just a bloody massive game! Brilliant, though hasn't aged well. I've only played through it once Total Annihilation Before this game, RTSs used to have units that fires up to at most half a screen away. Suddenly you could build things that could fire ACROSS THE BLOODY MAP! Also, the unit cap was mentally high. Like GTA III, showed that things could be built bigger.
Showing your roots there.... My choices are: Wolfenstein 3d Mega Lo Mania Dune Far Cry Sensible World of Soccer I still boot up my amiga to play Sensi and Mega-lo-mania. Dune was great on the PC and copied by the Command and conquer series, but I don;t feel it was ever "bested". Wolfenstein and Far Cry still get bi-annual re-installs and they still engage me from beginning to end. ...In fact I'm due a reinstall soon
Carmageddon. The first one, mind. It was the equivalent of a triple-A video nasty from a relatively unknown developer that blew quite a few minds at the time... Edit: can I have almost anything released by Bullfrog in the first half of the 90s, as well as the Wing Commander series as well?
Surprised no-one's said Rogue yet - even today the term 'roguelike' is used... Quake Unreal Tournament Angry Birds Ultima Online Word of Warcraft EVE Deus Ex Half Life 2
Dota 1 Civilization 1/2 Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Theme Park and/or Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 C&C Red Alert Summarise the good choices?
Damn Skippy. Let's go right back to the beginning: Pong: because Pong. Space Invaders: because Space Invaders. Pacman: not about shooting things! Zork: first text adventure. Atari Adventure: really not about shooting things. Jet Set Willie: platformer history. ELITE: first 3D space sim, first open-ended game. Impossible Mission: pushed 8-bit gaming to the very limit of what computers could do. Little Computer People: well before The Sims. Way out: first 3D maze game. Like, ever. Wolfenstein 3D: the venerable father to Doom. Doom: because Doom. Tomb Raider: first 3D adventure game. Herzog Zwei: first RTS game. Sim City: first resource management game.
operation wolf double dragon space invaders afterburner ghost and goblins jet set willy another world (A500) last ninja
Thats because I have never heard of it, (I am but a young lad) one of the main reasons I started this thread. Couple of more from me: Mass Effect - Even me who doesn't give a toss about story lines, will admit mass effect was decent Richard Burns Rally - Best rally game of all, tough as nails but very rewarding Witcher 2 - For me it is probably the best executed game I have played (I am yet to play 3)
Well as a FPS addict. Maze War - The first! Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom - re-invented then popularised the genre as we know it. System Shock, Marathon - Real storytelling brought to First Person Shooting Quake - The birth of competitive gaming. Team Fortress - Class Based competitive multiplayer. Goldeneye 64 - Consoles finally get a great FPS, local multiplayer and variable with difficulty objectives. Half Life - Starts the shift towards set piece and spectacle driven campaigns. Counter Strike - Takes competitive FPS multiplayer from relatively niche to the second most popular genre in gaming. Alien: Resurrection - The Twin Stick controller layout, later used to great effect Halo: Combat Evolved and Timesplitters. But these guys did it first. Red Faction - Geo Mod dynamic terrain and level destruction. Command And Conquer: Renegade - Large scale combined arms multiplayer including base assets, land vehicles and aircraft (came out before BF1942). PlanetSide - Ups the scale until the team sizes are everybody vs everybody else, still more or less unique 13 years later. Far Cry - AI, level scale, dynamic lighting (this came out before Doom 3), graphics. Halo 2 - Popularised console gaming online, made Xbox Live viable. Also the first major release to solely use regenerating health mechanics with no persistent health bar of any kind. Half Life 2 - Facial Animation, effective use of DRM (boo!), physics. Battlefield 2 - Persistent score based progression and unlocks. Crysis - Set the graphics bench mark for at least the next 5 years. AI (again), moves game physics on from Half Life 2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - Unleashes the base 100 score system, rapid unlock based progression, customisation and a million screaming children on the world, for better or worse. Battlefield: Bad Company - Dynamic terrain and map destruction in multiplayer. Left 4 Dead - The first co-operative game to truly force co-operative play. Since 2008 though, I can't think of much that's really driven the FPS forward. BF3, STALKER, Metro and so on are great, but they all more or less refine what's gone before rather than presenting a step change in what I/we expect from a First Person Shooter. Even graphics haven't moved on that much since Crysis nine years ago.
as someone who works in the industry you can blame CoD4 for that, its run away success meant big business latched onto the gaming scene like nothing before, publishers bent over backwards; maximizing profits whilst playing it safe pretty much became the norm with titles being driven by mass marketing rather then innovation. Gameplay suffered as newly acquired casual gamers were encouraged to breeze through the game and onto the sequel that was already well into its development cycle and due to be released in the next 12 months. around 2010 publishers started looking for more ways to gouge the gamer, content held back to be resold later as DLC (yes i worked for a studio that used to do that); season passes, stupid pre order bonus's and the like. technological advancement also suffered in favor of developing for mass consumed archaic console hardware and joypad control schemes, (wonder why the RTS took a nose dive?) GPU tech grew stagnant as the only thing pushing them was lazy porting, sure there have been exceptions but they were exactly that; exceptions. with Publishers effectively controlling all the money innovation pretty much died and gaming became almost disposable, communities were discouraged from growing as server side multiplayer shut down whenever they wanted gamers to move onto the next iteration of game, coupled with the lack of communication options available to console tech mean we wont see communities like quake and UT again, that was until Kickstarter launched in 2011 (realistically it didn't gain traction until the end of 2012) imo KS was greatest things to ever happen to this industry, it proved that publishers didn't hold all the money and that niche titles could be successful. we've only just started to see the benefits of independent development in the past 2 years and with indie publishers on the rise (devlover/gog etc) we're starting to see innovation again, and hell; even some publishers are starting to stop acting like shitlords and start embracing unique games again. its an exciting time to be a pc gamer again, the only thing we have to deal with now are the new generation of gamers who believe that every game should be on every platform and that their old dell pos they bought from pc world can run the latest and greatest with ease. we just need a few more games like X-com 2 we'll be ****ing set *edit* holy **** i went off on one. back on topic supreme commander the innovation behind the spiritual successor to TA is unrivaled, never has controlling a large arm been so easy.
No love for Manic Miner? To be fair, I lost many an hour to both games. You sure? I thought 3DMM was first. Although Wayout does deserve a place in it's own right for 360 degree movement. Pole Position and Outrun I was going to suggest Tetris and Super Mario but, despite being iconic, did they really move the industry forward? I cannot believe I forgot Zork.
I'd say yes. My reasoning is as follows... Tetris was important 'cos it did two things. The first is that it expanded the market outside the US, UK, and Japan. Before Tetris, games released in the US and the UK came from the US, the UK, or Japan. Those were yer lot, at least as far as what we'd now call AAA titles went. Post Tetris, we saw an explosion of imports from all kinds of countries. The second is that it confirmed the importance of tying down a proper contract for your licence; just ask Tengen! Super Mario Bros. was important because it was one of the first platformers to feature smooth scrolling (the actual first being Jump Bug, four years prior) - albeit in one direction only. Prior to that, platformers had been restricted to screen-by-screen movement. Think of Manic Miner: you reach the edge of one screen, there's a pause while the next screen is loaded, then you're on the next screen. Super Mario Bros. didn't do that; you could run through the whole level smoothly. How important was that? Well, it was so important that a chap you may have heard of spent an age recreating the effect for the PC. His name? Albert Einstein^W^WJohn Carmack. If he hadn't have made his rip-off of Super Mario Bros. 3 - Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement - there likely wouldn't have been an id Software (which means no Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake...) and without someone proving it was even possible without console hardware it could have been years until smooth-scrolling platformers became the norm on IBM Compatibles. (I specify "IBM Compatibles" for a very important reason: smooth scrollers had been possible for years on non-IBM hardware. Super Mario Bros. was quickly ripped off for for the Commodore 64 as The Great Giana Sisters in 1987, then rapidly pulled from sale 'cos it was literally a one-for-one copy with different sprites. The Commodore 64, though, had hardware designed specifically for moving sprites from one location to the other; an IBM Compatible didn't, making smooth-scrolling much, much more difficult as it all had to be handled in software. That said, there were smooth scrollers on IBM Compatible hardware prior to Carmack's new engine: these were typically arcade ports of games like Defender and Moon Patrol, and 'cheated' by having a plain black background contrasting unfavourably with Carmack's ability to offer console-like full-colour levels.)
